This is a sort of guide on canvas sizes, inches, dpi and pixel x pixels.

when it came to canvas sizes, I always kind of assumed that inches belonged with dpi and pixels were just pixels and that everyone knew that; but i read a whole bunch of comments on a tumblr blog where someone asked about canvas sizes, and SO MANY people were replying with things such as, "4000x4000 px at 300 dpi" or "2000x2000 px at 200dpi".

and I guess not everyone quite understands what dpi's really used for xD.

DPI = Dots per Inch. It means how many dots will be printed per inch.

DPI is actually used for printing purposes. It shows the printer how much pixels to print per inch, literally. A common printer (at home or even at a lot of printing stores) at best prints at 150dpi most of the time actually; there are some super duper great printers that can print REALLY fine that can go up to ...apparently a lot more xD; #dpi, so that's why everyone usually suggests saving your project at 300dpi; most printers are fine with 300dpi, because anything above that is a little overkilling it. There are some super-fine printers though that can print up to maybe 600dpi, but those are not really that common. alright, so apparently it's pretty common ~ but I've never found myself needing to go above 300dpi; stuff in 150dpi works well for me too, actually >_>;;~ Unless, of course, you're doing extremely high-quality fine-art prints that can sell up to $30-$60 a piece, because really high-quality prints (that requires 600+dpi) costs a lot to print in the first place, so I won't suggest this for anime/comic conventions ~

so say I have a canvas at 5400 x 3600px, it literally means that I have a canvas that can be printed on a 18 x 12 inch paper at 300 dpi. If I have a 5400 x 3600px canvas at 200dpi, that pixels of the canvas don't change, but the inches on the physical paper can change to 27x18 inches when it comes to printing it. The canvas pixels aren't going to change just because you have it at 200dpi, so putting 200dpi, 300dpi or even 800dpi, it isn't going to make a difference digital canvas-wise. If you say something like "5400 x 3600px at 300 dpi", it's the same as saying "5400 x 3600px at 18 x 12 inches.". See how they don't mix?

Either put down how big it is in pixels (because you don't REALLY need the 300dpi if you're not printing it out), or if you have an intention of printing it out, do it in inches (or cm, if that's what you're used to) with a dpi attached.

Even photoshop makes it clear - The pixels are in the "Pixel-dimention" section, and the inches/cm/mm/etc and dpi is under the "Document-size" section.

TL;DR: Canvas inches and dpis are for physical prints only; Pixels are digital, so they don't mix with dpis or inches, etc. Digital and physical don't mix in a way that would make sense. Please don't say "2000 x 2000px at 300dpi"~ @_@;

I hope I made sense and cleared up some misconceptions about dpi and canvas sizes . ….and i hope i didn't make a mistake here hahaha;;;.

sorry if i sounded like a know-it-all v_v;; i guess I found a new pet-peeve D;~…

damn, i wrote a lot; sorry, bad habit D:~!

edit: if you're a math-kindda person, you can also look at this mathamatically:

sorry if this is a noob question but is the resolution section on sai when making a new canvas the same as DPI? i feel pretty nooby asking this and i've been using SAI for a year hehe -nervously sweats-

Hmm. Seems interesting. Mind if I ask you, but what is the average size of canvas for something like a tutorial? Those long deviations? Since I'm wondering if I can use that canvas size for my closed species.

My printer only prints at 600 dpi, it's a newer HP Photosmart, so I'm getting overkill regardless. Why would I print an image at 3600x5400 and have every 1 "dot" end up being printed as 4? Well the answer is quite simple really: because my computer sucks monkey balls and wouldn't be able to handle 7200x10800 pixel images, lmao.

I believe there's a way: on the top right corner of your comment there is a pencil icon. Click it and it will give you the choice to edit or hide your comment. Think two times before commenting. Just a kind advise, 'kay?

I've been looking for something like this! what are good dementions for a webcomic? usually i scan stuff in, but i want to start drawing digitally - but whenever i do the pictures end up pixelated when i zoom in a bit, and i can't seem to do any proper detail. (using paint tool SAI btw) i thought it was something to do with a low DPI setting but apparently not...?

Gaah I still do not understand and it is driving me INSANE! I use Sketchbook Pro 6, and I want to do a print somewhere around like 26x17. But all Sketchbook has is just a place to put in the inches you want for size. You can change it to pixels, but then that changes the inches...? So I wan to have my print be 300dpi, but I want it to be that big. How the heck do I do that?

When it's showing inches, it should also show dpi at the same time. Worse comes to worse, you can do it manually: 26 x 17 inches at 300 dpi, you just have to multiply 26 by 300 and 17 by 300, and you'd have your measurements in pixels.

i have a photo i took, its 4062 x 1993 pixels when i open it in photoshop...my intention is to print this photo out at work where we have a printer that can print 52 inches by however long the roll of print paper is.....but im trying to determine how big my photo actually is and how big can i get it to print without it getting distorted....it says in the doc size that the photo is approx 13 x 6 inches at 300 resolution...that seems small.....can i just change the size to be larger and will it affect the quality....i want to create a big print but maintain best quality...what settings should i use or change?

yah, 4062 x 1993 sounds around 13 x 6 inches at 300 dpi. You can change the size (make it 15 x 7 or something) but it will no longer be at 300dpi; it'd probably be around 260dpi or something (photoshop will give you an accurate number, i'm just guessing here). If you want a 52 inch by something picture AND have it print at 300 dpi, the pixel resolution would be extremely big, somewhere around 15600 pixels by something at 300dpi. (15600 pixels is 52 inches at 300 dpi). At this point, I'm really not sure what you can do without losing quality though, since your digital picture is already set in a certain size at a certain quality;...I'd say re-take the picture and put the setting at the largest resolution possible, but I don't know if that's possible for you either. I think printing things out at 150 dpi would be okay too and the quality would suffer only a little bit. anything less than that dpi-wise would make the picture blur and pixelize (is that a word?).

the only time I bother about dpi is when I'm scanning images, which I usually do at 600dpi or above. like printing it's really the only time I find where the dpi settings will really affect the quality

The normal I use is 4500 x 3000px and the biggest I could get in my current computer is just 8000 x 6000px, anything above that become slower. I only use few layers below 20 on my projects so bigger don't bother me much.

Personally most things I do are 300/600dpi but I always work at A4+ sizes when it comes to the important work. You never know when your lecture is going to spark up a shit storm and suddenly demand it be the size of your display board :S

haha the TL;DR note made me laugh xDI did read about this before, and I actually did my own research till the point it got so confusing and it gave me a headache. so I came up with this one conclusion out of all of it: if I wanna print my art better be 600dpi or 300dpi at least.. that's enough for me to know, for now =u=

Great article! I have a question though. I find that when I increase the dpi in Photoshop, it drastically resizes my canvas. (For example, a 4x6 inche canvas at 72 dpi fits my screen pretty well. 4x6 inches at 300 dpi makes my canvas enormous on my screen.) If dpi is only for printing and it isn't supposed to have an effect on viewing the image digitally, why does the canvas resize so much?

your screen can only show 72 or sometimes 94ppi (pixel per inch; ppi = dpi but ppi is the correct term to use when talking about digital useage) but it's going to show you all pixels, therefore the document will be larger on screen at 100% zoom since you still need to be able to edit all 300ppi not just part of them.

because you're also miming the physical canvas by putting in 4 x 6 inches. When I say "physical", i meant....well, you don't really print out something by calling it 3000 x 5000 pixels, right? but you do say it in inches. When you put down inches on the computer, then it applies to a possible physical print.

sorry, when i say digital, i simply meant pixels, and when i say physical, i meant to say inches/centimeters/real-life-tangible numbers.

because there are so many more pixels. see, the printed image would be the same size, but the 300 dpi is much, much more detailed. it really isn't different sizes and you should be able to zoom out anyway.

So since DPI doesn't really matter from a digital only stand point, could I set my resolution to 72 and save space and reduce lag from the file being so big? I used to think that dpi improved the quality of the picture for years. I guess that's wrong Thanks for the new info.

If you have 300 pixels per inch in a digital file, then you'll be able to detail each of those 300 pixels allowing for great detail in your work. If you show it on a screen (as a desktop background or something) the physical amount of pixels per inch on the screen decide how much detail is shown. My laptop screen has roughly 100 pixels per inch, so it wouldn't be able to show the remaining 200 pixels of such a file unless I zoomed in on it by 300%. Usually, images are zoomed out for convenience's sake, like the images on dA, so they are further compressed. If you use 200 pixels per inch, then everyone should be fine with your work, and not be able to see any pixels. I at least find 72 to be much too low for anything since pixels bug me.

No, actually, dpi has nothing to do with your digital-canvas size. You can have a file at 5000 x 4000 at 200 dpi, but the megabite size would still be the same, because the pixel-size of the canvas wouldn't change data-wise; it's just when you print it out physically, the dpi will effect phyical size, as in, how many dots will be printed per inch. did that make sense? This won't effect space data-wise at all .

I saved this just in case c: I use Photoshop a lot, so I normally leave it at 300 dpi or the default when opening a new document. Luckily I never had to print anything out because I also tend to forget to change RGB to CMYK xD Thanks for sharing the info! It's very much appreciated (n_n)